Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray

The Ostrich Boys are three British fifteen-year-olds who don't know how to grieve the loss of the fourth member of their group, Ross, who was hit by a car while riding his bicycle. They do know that the funeral they attended for Ross did not satisfy their needs and so they decide to do their own funeral for him. They decide that a tiny place in Scotland called Ross is the perfect place to hold the event. None of them had been there before, but Ross had always talked about going there to find himself; to be Ross in Ross. And so they steal the urn of Ross's ashes from his family and hop on a train. That is the start of their adventures... and misadventures. A road trip funeral with much learning along the way about the importance of friendship.

Excerpt: "Not so long ago we'd simply dismissed girls for their inability to achieve boyhood. How awful, we used to think, it must be not to be a boy. Nowadays, of course, women were magnetic - always making us want to point North." It's a treat to come across a great book for guys. Grades 8-12.

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

The Bonesetter's Daughter is told in three parts: present day San Francisco; a small village in China pre-1940; and then back to present day U.S.A.

Ruth's mother, LuLing, was born in China and raised by a horribly disfigured nursemaid called Precious Auntie. There is a mystery surrounding the identity of LuLing's mother. LuLing's husband died young, so it was just Ruth and her mother in her family as she grew up. As an adult, Ruth has great difficulty negotiating intimate relationships. She has lived with a divorced man and his two teenaged daughters for 10 years, but still doesn't feel like she belongs there. Meanwhile, she worries about her mother, who is developing Alzheimer's. LuLing and Ruth are both complex, interesting women.

The first two parts were excellent but the final part seemed rushed and everything gets resolved into an unrealistically happy ending. Still, I would recommend this to women who enjoy reading about mother-daughter relationships. That is definitely Amy Tan's greatest strength.

You'll Never Know: A Graphic Memoir by C. Tyler. Book One: A Good and Decent Man

This bittersweet memoir told in comic strips explores the way events in history continue to have repercussions. Carol Tyler's father was a young American soldier who fought in World War II. He was taciturn, prone to sudden rages and would never talk about his experiences there. Carol was born in about 1950, grew up surrounded by siblings, attended Catholic schools, married, moved far away, had a daughter, split up with her husband - all the normal stuff. What is remarkable is her honest examination of her own life and how it was shaped by her family, as well as her determination to delve into the emotional scars of her father's past. It wasn't until he was in his nineties that stories about war suddenly began to pour out of him. Something awful happened in Italy, but we still don't know what it was by the end of book one.

Usually I include a cover image from a graphic novel in order to give an idea of the art style. This time I've chosen one of Tyler's story panels because I could identify so strongly with it; the period in my life when I cried every time I went into a church.

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

The French artists who dared to paint in an entirely new way in the late nineteenth century were scorned by the arts establishment. Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Morisot and others struggled to make money through their art. Their work was rarely accepted into the yearly Paris Salon, the main venue for exhibition and sales in France.

The parts I enjoyed most in this rather dry and lengthy collective biography were the quotes from art critiques and cartoonists of the period. When one of Manet's portraits of Berthe Morisot, Repose, was displayed in the Salon, it was ridiculed with "derogatory captions that played on Manet's depictions of Berthe's darkness and disarray: A Lady Resting after Sweeping the Chimney; Seasickness; The Goddess of Slovenliness."

A small number of colour plates are bound into the book, which is helpful, but I found myself googling many more images that were not included. (See here for an online image of Repose.) Roe portrayed all of the artists in their very best light, which seemed rather unrealistic to me, but I gleaned interesting information from this book and will look elsewhere for the down and dirty.

The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters; two books by Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, has also published a couple of unusual books that are a cross between graphic novels, picture books (for adults) and art books. Niffenegger herself calls The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters "visual novels," while the publisher has added stickers to the covers identifying them as "novels in pictures." They consist of a series of aquatint etchings with a very small amount of text on the facing pages. The illustrations pretty much carry the narrative on their own, with the text supplying names for the protagonists and such.

The Adventuress is about an unlucky young woman who is rather blown about by the winds of fate: created by her alchemist father, stolen away by an evil baron and then forced to marry. But she has spunk and surprising inner resources, so this is only the beginning of her adventures. The story is surreal, the images engaging and the total effect is magical.

The Three Incestuous Sisters is more of a melodrama: two sisters in love with the same man, a number of tragic deaths and then a happy ending. One sister can levitate and mentally commune with her unborn nephew (who will be born with wings), so expect some dream-like sequences here too. The aquatints are truly fabulous. This kind of printmaking takes a lot of time; Niffenegger spent 14 years creating this book. It only takes a short time to read, but the images can be enjoyed over and over. See more of her work at her website.

The Surface of Meaning: Books and Book Design in Canada by Robert Bringhurst

Robert Bringhurst was at two of the events that I attended at the Vancouver writers festival. I was not impressed with him at the first one, "The Look of the Book," where he sat hunched in such a way as to be facing away from the rest of the panel and the audience, usually not looking at the images of the other authors' works on screen and giving curmudgeonly one-word answers to questions.

Seth, Anik See and Audrey Niffenegger were the other panelists. Their contributions were lively and thoughtful. I'll write about them in future blog posts.

My friend Merle kindly loaned me two of her books by Bringhurst after I blogged about The Elements of Typographic Style: they are The Surface of Meaning and The Solid Form of Language. The latter is an essay about the written forms of world languages and the special challenges inherent in recording sound and meaning in a visual form. It is a tiny, beautifully-made book with such a tactile dust jacket that I would say I liked the look of this book better than the contents, which are a bit too academic for me.

The Surface of Meaning, on the other hand, is very accessible and mostly consists of illustrations. It is a large book with glossy, heavy clay paper to reproduce the images as well as possible. I was particularly intrigued by Bringhurst's prologue, in which he argues that books are not necessarily physical objects. "In oral cultures, books are invisible - but in every healthy and mature oral culture, books are present. Oral books that occupy no shelf space can and do unfold to epic size in storytellers' voices - and can retain that size, and that complexity, in a thoughtful listener's mind."

I happened to come across an essay by William H. Glass (In Defense of the Book; Harper's Magazine; November 1999) this past week and he says a similar thing about books: "every real book (as opposed to dictionaries, almanacs and other compilations) is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness. Together they compose a civilization, or even several."

I was pleased that Bringhurst brought up this alternate definition of books at the festival, but the other authors were quick to disagree with him when he pronounced that neither a telephone directory nor a catalogue of paintings are books. It might have been after this interaction that Bringhurst partially withdrew from the remainder of the evening's discussion; I can't remember. Anyway, Bringhurst was also in the Saturday evening "Poetry Bash" and his poems and delivery were outstanding, so he totally redeemed himself in my eyes.

The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon

I've just returned to Edmonton after a week at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival and I'm way behind in blogging about the books I've been reading but WOW, what a great time I had!

Annabel Lyon was in a panel called "Playing with Real People," along with Thomas Trofimuk (Waiting for Columbus) and Kate Braid (A Well-Mannered Storm: The Glenn Gould Poems). I had taken note of the hype surrounding Lyon's novel; it was hard not to, since it is a finalist for the Giller, the Governor General and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. It is told in the voice of Aristotle and covers a time period from about 343 to 350 B.C.E. I enjoy historical fiction, but I was put off recently by my strong disappointment with Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia (a retelling of Virgil's Aeneid) and so I was purposefully avoiding The Golden Mean. Big mistake!

After listening to Lyon read an excerpt from her new novel, I was totally hooked. I read it yesterday. I loved it.

There's a lot of action, what with Philip of Macedon intent on world domination and grooming his psychopathic son, Alexander to follow in his footsteps, while Aristotle, as Alexander's tutor, tries to shape the boy's ethics and brilliant mind. My pleasure in reading this book is explained by Alexander, talking to Aristotle: "That's the point of the literary arts, surely. You can convey ideas in an accessible way, and in a way that makes the reader or the viewer feel what is being told rather than just hear it." Just so. The characterization is richly rewarding. The setting feels real. The language is beautiful. The Golden Mean has all four of Nancy Pearl's doorways into reading.

The final line from The Golden Mean is: "Can anyone tell me what a tragedy is?" It would have been tragic if I'd missed out on reading this. I'm glad I'm not a Giller judge having to choose between this and Anne Michael's The Winter Vault. If you want to guess the winner, by the way, there's a contest.